Resistive screens are dead: HTC now selling a stylus for capacitive screens

When it comes to touchscreens, you just can’t beat the feeling of a nice, high-quality capacitive screen. If you’ve been using an iPhone, Motorola Droid, or any one of many capacitive smartphones made in the past few years, try to hunt down one with a resistive screen; the difference is almost shocking. Touches to a capacitive touchscreen are registered with the lightest tap, while moving things around on a resistive screen requires you to press down so hard that people probably think you’re angry at it.

Of course, resistive screens have their benefits; namely, they play friendly with styluses. As predictive text gets better, this isn’t too big of a deal for English speakers – we only have so many characters to deal with. But for the many languages of the world in which there are simply too many characters to squeeze into any sort of usable user interface, character recognition is the only option. As a result, a stylus — and thus a resistive screen — is a must. HTC wants to combine the best of both worlds, and have just launched a stylus that plays friendly with capacitive screens.

They’re certainly not the first to do it (POGO has had a stylus that plays friendly with iPhones for a long while now), but this is the first time we’ve seen a company of HTC’s magnitude get into the space. HTC pumps out a whole lot of handsets each year – if they’re doing this in preparation of bailing on resistive screens once and for all, this may very well mark the death of resistive touch screens in the mobile space.

The stylus is only being sold as a stand alone item for now, at the grand price of $28 bucks. With that said, don’t be too surprised if HTC starts including these in the box sometime in the near future, if only for the sake of us with big ol’ meaty digits.